Role-playing games now have their own [pattern language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language) (Wikipedia’s defintion is great) book. Fascinating stuff!

In computer science there is a book called [Design Patterns](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201633612/104-0265062-8435910?v=glance), which is a spin-off of the architecture book A Pattern Language. Both are classics.

Now a person called **Whitson John Kirk III** has written 250+ pages in a CC-licensed PDF on the parts that make up roleplaying games.

He covers ground from Rolemaster to My Life With Master, so no lack of breadth there.

There are diagrams that condense ideas The pattern *Class Hierarchy* has a picture on how character careers lock into each other in games that support characters that advance in their chosen trade.

I am just amazed by this, so please read this, or parts of it. Christopher Alexander’s book on architecture has a lot of talk about how important it is to not read the whole thing in one go, eat it piecemeal. Otherwise you’ll get bogged down in details. So, one pattern a day. No more.

**Download** it here: Design Patterns of Successful Roleplaying Games (.zip) by Whitson John Kirk III. (CC license!)

Via: [Jason Morningstar](http://www.meekmok.com/sassy/archives/002916.html).

Dogs in the Vineyard, the Vision is a story about how the game “DitV” came into its own: became itself.

Oh, I am moved. Take a load of this

> I have wanted to contact you ever since I bought the game. As a member of the LDS faith, an avid role-player, a student of history, a lover of fantastic fiction, and a fan of westerns, I believe that I am your ultimate target audience.

> I loved reading this game and I got a bunch of my LDS gaming buddies together and even invited my father, himself a convert to the church who doesn’t do pen and paper role-playing, but is a gun nut and historian in his own right who started the Utah chapter of the Single Action Shooting Society ([SASS](http://www.sassnet.com/)). He expressed some anxiety to me about playing a game with me and my friends, and I scoffed at him. The SASS is an organization of western shooters, who meet and have shooting matches in full period costume, using only period weapons, and who all go by period aliases.

> Compared to Dad, my friends and I are all couch potato posers!

[Tobias](http://blog.wrigstad.com/) and I have now condensed our thoughts on role-playing in the form of [a wiki](http://jeepen.olle.ter.dk/wiki/doku.php), but that fails to attract others, being hard to read, follow and use. Especially off-line.

The solution was to rewite some of the material and to collect it in one, accessible place. We had already bought [jeepen.org](http://blog.jeepen.org/), and set up a blog there, so now you can find our newly repackaged material at [dict.jeepen.org](http://dict.jeepen.org/).

This is quite exciting, and I hope it is a way of sharing our thoughts, and revising them more often.

**Double-geek contents note**: A Ruby script for some HTML transforms, a CSS file to style the resulting HTML file, and a Makefile to run the whole thing, and to upload the new files to the website. And, yes, all text is in a Subversion source-control repository. Future plans include moving the text to Markdown format, to be easier on the editors’ eyes, and controlling the action from a Rakefile instead. Scripting everything in Ruby is… more fun.